Jessa Crispin

Are you a feminist? Do you believe women are human beings and that they deserve to be treated as such? That women deserve all the same rights and liberties bestowed upon men? If so, then you are a feminist... or so the feminists keep insisting. But somewhere along the way, the movement for female liberation sacrificed meaning for acceptance, and left us with a banal, polite, ineffectual pose that barely challenges the status quo. In this bracing, fiercely intelligent manifesto, Jessa Crispin demands more.

A Feminist Manifesto

Why I Am Not a Feminist

Mary MacLane

A rerelease the daring, intellectually challenging diary by the 19-year-old memoirist from turn-of-the-20th-century Montana features confessional explorations of her sexuality that offer insight into her writing style and acclaim as one of the earliest American feminist authors and is complemented by a new forward by critic Jessa Crispin. Reprint.

I Await the Devil's Coming

A guide for artists and creative people looking to tarot for guidance and inspiration. Written for novices and seasoned readers alike, "The Creative Tarot" is a unique guidebook that reimagines tarot cards and the ways they can boost the creative process.

A Modern Guide to an Inspired Life

The Creative Tarot

When Jessa Crispin was thirty, she left Chicago and took off for Berlin. Half a decade later, she's still on the road, in search not so much of a home as of understanding.Fascinated by exile, Crispin travels an itinerary of of places that have drawn writers who needed to break free from their origins and start afresh.She reflects on Maud Gonne fomenting revolution, on Nora Barnacl, Rebecca West, Margaret Anderson and Jean Rhys.

Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries

The Dead Ladies Project

Bir Feminist Manifesto

Neden Feminist Degilim

Do you think that women are human beings and the deserve to be treated as such? That women deserve the same rights and liberties as men? If so, then you are a feminist... or so say the feminists. Somewhere along the way, the movement for female liberation left us with a banal, polite, ineffectual position that barely challenges the status quo. In this bracing and fierce manifesto, Jessa Crispin demands more.

Un Manifiesto Feminista

Por Qué No Soy Feminista

Perché non sono femminista. Un manifesto femminista

Perché non sono femminista

A hilarious, ambitious work of trenchant cultural criticism that traces the origins of today’s crisis of masculinity through . . . Michael Douglas’s oeuvre from the eighties and nineties

How to be a Man? That question—and all the anxiety, anger, and resentment it stirs up—is the starting point for a crisis in masculinity that today manifests as misogyny, nativism, and corporate greed; gives rise to incels and mass shooters; and leads to panic over the rights of women and minorities. According to Jessa Crispin, it is the most important question of our time, and the answer to it might be found in an unlikely place: the films of Michael Douglas.

In the 1980s, the rules for masculinity began to change. The goal was no longer to be a good, respectable family man, carrying on the patriarchal traditions of generations past. Not only was it becoming unfashionable, but increasingly difficult: the economic and political shifts—a slashed social safety net, globalization—made it harder to find a breadwinning income, a stable home life, and a secure place in the public sphere. So, then, how to be a man? From the early eighties to the late nineties, Michael Douglas showed us how: he was our president, our Wall Street overlord, our mass shooter, our failed husband, our midlife crisis, our cop, and our canary in the patriarchal coal mine. His characters were a mirror of our cultural shift, serving as the foundation for everything from the 1994 Crime Bill to Trump’s ultimate rise. With wry wit and wisdom, Crispin examines the phenomenon of the Michael Douglas character as a silver-screen seismograph registering the tectonic movements within our society that have fractured it in shocking ways.

Blending feminist arguments and pop culture criticism, Crispin uses the iconic roles of Michael Douglas, from Fatal Attraction to Wall Street to The Game, as a lens to explore men’s and our culture’s ongoing anxieties around women, money, and power. Ultimately, What Is Wrong with Men reveals that the patriarchy has now fully betrayed men, along with everyone else and shows how unpacking one of its most fervent icons can help us envision a pathway forward.


Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything

What Is Wrong with Men

Dead Ladies Project

Creative Tarot

Ein feministisches Manifest

Warum ich keine Feministin bin

"Jessa Crispin melds personal narrative with history and current events to explore the dark side of Kansas, where she grew up. She meditates on why the American Midwest still enjoys an esteemed position in the US's imagination about itself, why its foundational myths are the myths of what it means to be "American." And while we may romanticize aspects of Midwestern life-the nuclear family, the pioneering attitude, the small town friendliness-the realities, she argues, are harsher: so-called Midwestern values cover up a long history of oppression and control over Native Americans, over women, over the economically disadvantaged. Her subjects range from The Wizard of Oz to the White race, from chastity to rape, from radical militias and recent terrorist plots to Utopian communities; from the murders of the Clutter family made famous in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, to her own horror when a beloved art teacher inexplicably one night slaughtered his wife and three daughters and killed himself. Her pursuit takes her back to the Civil War, John Brown, and the immigration of German religious communities to the Midwest; she then ferries across the Atlantic Ocean to Amsterdam to visit a lay seminary for women where, since the Reformation, they have found sanctuary from violence and domestic abuse. Yet, despite the darkness, which is Crispin's stock in trade, there is a kind of bleak redemption at the heart of this project, the insight that, no matter where you go, no matter how far from home you roam, the place you came from is always with you, "like it or not.""--

Patriarchy on the Great Plains

My Three Dads

una guía moderna para una vida inspirada

El tarot creativo

Sharp and thought-provoking, this memoir-meets-cultural criticism upends the romanticism of the Great Plains and the patriarchy at the core of its ideals. For many Americans, Kansas represents a vision of Midwestern life that is good and wholesome and evokes the American ideals of god, home, and country. But for those like Jessa Crispin who have grown up in Kansas, the realities are much harsher. She argues that the Midwestern values we cling to cover up a long history of oppression and control over Native Americans, women, and the economically disadvantaged. Blending personal narrative with social commentary, Crispin meditates on why the American Midwest still enjoys an esteemed position in our country's mythic self-image. Ranging from The Wizard of Oz to race, from chastity to rape, from radical militias and recent terrorist plots to Utopian communities, My Three Dads opens on a comic scene in a Kansas rent house the author shares with a (masculine) ghost. This prompts Crispin to think about her intellectual fathers, her spiritual fathers, and her literal fathers. She is curious to understand what she has learned from them and what she needs to unlearn about how a person should be in a family, as a citizen, and as a child of god—ideals, Crispin argues, that have been established and reproduced in service to hierarchy, oppression, and wealth. Written in Crispin’s well-honed voice—smart, assured, comfortable with darkness—My Three Dads offers a kind of bleak redemption, the insight that no matter where you go, no matter how far from home you roam, the place you came from is always with you, “like it or not.”

Jessa Crispin

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